Imperfect Produce

1. The government of Australia recently launched an advertising campaign aimed at encouraging consumers to buy produce that has been damaged or blighted by the country's drought. It's about time we started valuing this undervalued source of sustenance: according to a recent study, as much as half of the world's food goes to waste.

Anyone who has worked in the industry won't find this the least bit shocking. Just last week there was considerable discussion on the blogosphere about a Whole Foods employee who was reputedly fired for saving one tuna sandwich out of a pile of sandwiches that he was supposed to be throwing away.

Our preference for perfect looking produce--which the Australian ad campaign is trying to counteract--is one of the reasons why our fruits and vegetables are so heavily sprayed: insecticides are a cheap and easy way for producers to meet consumers' demands and expectations.

It's not surprising that it's taken a severe drought to raise awareness about the fact that we're throwing away plenty of perfectly good food. We can only hope that some of this new conservation consciousness will last even after it starts raining again.

A Glimmer of Spring

1. Although the weather is still unseasonably cold, we're beginning to see some hopeful signs at the market. The flower vendors are returning. There's some salad mix available, and nettles and fiddlehead ferns. Farmers are starting to sell gardening starts, and eggs are considerably more abundant than they were a month ago.

Dinner Rush- The Movie

1. The other day I watched the movie "Dinner Rush", with Danny Aiello and Sandra Bernhard, among others, about an Italian restaurant that's also a front for a bookmaking operation.

I enjoyed the cooking scenes and the portrayal of the back-of-the-house dynamics, as well as the tension between trendy cuisine and traditional food. But ultimately what made it a good movie, rather than just food porn, was the fact that the characters were all so solid and believable. I recommend it.

Chopping Onions

1. I've heard of many different tricks to keep your eyes from tearing when you're cutting onions. Some people refrigerate them before they chop them. Others hold something between their teeth to keep their mouths open. I've also heard it helps to use a really sharp knife, and one woman who worked for me always used to keep a fan blowing while she prepped them.

My advice: suck it up. Deal with it. The more onions you cut, the less they affect you. Some individual onions are especially potent, but I haven't yet figured out a way to identify them ahead of time.

The Budding Meadowbrook Farmers' Market

1. There will be a new farmers' market sprouting this summer in the Meadowbrook neighborhood, located in the parking lot of the Seattle Waldorf School on NE 100th St., between 35th Ave. NE and Lake City Way. It will be held on Sundays from 11-3, from May 31 until October 25.

In addition to being a sales venue, this market will focus heavily on education, which is fitting for an event being held on the grounds of a school. Part of its mission is to teach the community about organic gardening and the importance of eating local foods.

I'm always glad to see any new market, and I'm also excited to hear of one that's being operated independently of the two organizations that run nearly every other farmers' market in the city. I appreciate and admire the work that these two organizations do, but things can get insulated and political at times so it's refreshing to have other options as well.

Feeding Frenzy

This weekend I sampled my tamales and did a couple of cooking demos at the 8th annual Vegfest, a festival dedicated to encouraging folks to make plant-based food choices.

It's the largest vegetarian festival in North America, and it's run entirely by volunteers. I find this inspiring, though I wish there was more of an emphasis on fresh food rather than processed items.

Each year, during the last hour of the event, they start selling off the leftover perishable product. It's a feeding frenzy. One year I picked up a bunch of stuff but I ended up not eating half of it, so since then I've stayed out of the fray. But this year a friend who was helping out in my booth made some impressive acquisitions, so I ended up getting some things too.

In general, I try not to buy anything on sale that I wouldn't buy if it wasn't on sale, unless the price is the only reason I don't buy it normally. But I don't always keep to that. I came home with a bag of frozen entrees. I hope I eat them all eventually.

I think we're predisposed to horde food, and that it goes back to our hunter-gatherer days when we didn't know for sure where the next meal was coming from. It's hard to push back against tens of thousands of years of genetic programming.

The Return of Tap Water

1. There was some good news this week about our collective national thirst for bottled water. According to an industry report, bottled water sales in the US are slowing down considerably, and forecasters predict a growth rate of less than 1% per year for the next 5 years.

Market analysts are blaming the slowdown on the weak economy, and the fact that tap water is cheaper than bottled water. I like to think that awareness campaigns had something to do with it as well, and folks are drinking less bottled water because there's something deeply unjust and dangerous about having a privatized water supply, not to mention the fact that the bottles are a colossal waste of plastic.

La Mexicana

I buy tortillas from a company in White Center that presses them themselves. I used to have them delivered, but my new kitchen is on a residential street which is too narrow for their truck, so now I have to pick them up.

I don't entirely mind. The place has a great feeling and it smells really good. They also have some lovely old equipment on display, like this maize grinder.

Vegan Lasagna

I made some vegan lasagna today for an event I'm catering on Friday. I tried to steer the client towards another choice, but they were set on the lasagna. So I made the best vegan lasagna I could.

Vegan lasagna makes me feel sad. There's so much great plant-based food around that doesn't try to imitate something it could never be, and that's the food I love to cook. (Having said that, I need to confess that I have a weakness for vegan sausage products. But that may be because I grew up in a mostly kosher household, and don't have much experience with the real thing.)

The Tenth Muse

1. I recently read the memoir The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, by Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who discovered Julia Child, among others. It was a good read, and gave an inside picture of what it was like to put together a cookbook in the days before the modern food revolution.

Having worked on several cookbooks, I was amazed at how different the process is today, in an age of email attachments and celebrity chefs. Jones would visit her authors regularly and even cook with them in an effort to capture and put their techniques onto the written page. The editors I've worked with have always been supportive, useful and friendly, but we've never collaborated with the kind of intensity Jones describes.

But that was a very different time. Jones was passionate about food herself, and avidly sought cooks who could help her stir a similar enthusiasm in an audience that was just awakening to the world of culinary possibilities. I'm glad I came of age during a time when the food world had so much to offer, but this book made me a bit sad that I missed out on this time when each new innovation merited such a high quality of individual attention.

Alice Waters on "60 Minutes"

Last night "60 Minutes" profiled Alice Waters, founder of the venerable Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley and pioneer of the fresh, local foods movement. It was an interesting piece, offering insight into why she's been so influential and also why many folks take issue with her.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for the work that Waters has done and the influence she's had. I'm not sure my own work would have been possible if she hadn't blazed her particular trail. But I bristled at the statement that she shudders at the thought of frozen food, as well as her much criticized contention that even poor people would be able to afford good food if they passed on that second pair of Nikes or that expensive cell phone.

I certainly want more people to eat more fresh, local, organic food, but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon on the scale that Waters envisions. In the meantime, we can go a long way towards improving the situation if we moved away from the all-or-nothing thinking that's most likely to capture media attention, and the snobbery that makes someone shudder at the idea of frozen food. There's plenty of middle ground, and change is most likely to come about on a piecemeal basis. Small changes can go a long way, and frozen vegetables are still a lot better than those that come in cans.

Another Demo

I did a cooking demo the other night at East West Bookshop, in the Roosevelt district. It presented some interesting challenges, not least because there was no cooking equipment. Also, they billed the event as "A Vegan Guide to Seattle's Farmers' Markets", so I needed to come up with something appropriate to that title.

I decided to do Rice Paper Spring Rolls, because I could cook the noodles in advance and the rest of the process involves no cooking. The recipe calls for salad greens mixed in with the noodles, so I went looking for some local salad greens at the University District on Saturday, but there were none to be had. It's been a really rough year for local produce. I did manage to find a hearty mix on Sunday at the Ballard Market, grown by Colinwood Farms. It had a number of varieties of seasonal greens I could recognize as well as quite a few that I couldn't, and that gave me a great entry point. I talked about the different leaves, passed some around, and encouraged folks to taste them

The event was scheduled for an hour and a half and that seemed daunting to me. Most cooking demos last about 40 minutes. The folks at the bookstore said it was okay to end early, but it ended up running almost the entire time. I realized that I can talk about farmers' markets and local foods all day, as long as the audience seems halfway engaged.

The "Eat Local Minority"

The marketing research firm Mintel released the results of a survey today which found that 17% of American adults, or one in six, buy locally produced goods and services whenever possible. Krista Faron, an analyst with the company, said, "We found that although the 'buy local' mantra has gotten strong media coverage and government support, most Americans haven't yet incorporated it into their lifestyles."

This is a great example of how you can read data in different ways depending, perhaps, on your agenda. I think it's great news that 17% of American adults buy local products whenever possible. That's a difficult standard to achieve. I buy a lot of my food at farmers' markets. Over the summer I'm at the markets five days a week. But I wouldn't say I buy local products whenever possible. There are certainly times when it would be possible for me to find a locally sourced alternative, but I don't buy it because it's inconvenient or expensive. Convenience and price aren't always the determining factors for me, but they do sometimes figure into my purchasing decisions, at least often enough that if a researcher asked me if I buy local products whenever possible, I'd probably say no.

So I think it's exciting that 17% of American adults answered the question in the affirmative, assuming, of course, that they're telling the truth.

3-Packs

All winter I've been insisting that my business hasn't been hurt at all by the lousy economy, but that's not entirely true. My sales at the markets are comparable--if not better--than they were a year ago, but different items are selling well.

In addition to the hot, read to eat food that we prepare, we also sell take-home packs of tamales, three to a pack. We sell them for $8 (a single tamale, hot and ready, costs $3.50.) Over the years we've sold anywhere from 3 or 4 packs to 15 or 20 packs at any given market. Last winter at the U District we were selling an average of 30 packs a week. That's more packs than I'd ever sold at any market.

This year we're selling a lot fewer. Though each tamale in the pack is cheaper than the ones we sell ready to eat, the packs still feel expensive to many customers. They are, in fact, the most pricey item we sell.

They do freeze well, so when we have some leftover, we freeze them so we'll have them for emergencies. Occasionally we run a special and clean out the freezer, selling the packs for $5 each. We've been selling 45 packs in a day when we do this, and it makes me wonder whether I should just lower the price overall. I do make some money selling them at that price, but not nearly as much as at full price.

I've struggled with this, and decided to keep the price where it is, and run specials every month or so. I don't want folks to get too used to the lower price, because then it won't seem worth it to them when we raise the price again. And over the summer we sometimes struggle to produce enough to meet demand, so I don't want to be selling them at a reduced price when I don't have enough to sell at full price. This makes me feel a bit like a cut throat capitalist, but my mother always tells me I need to move more in that direction, so maybe it's a start.

Mindless Eating

I just finished Brian Wansink's book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. I'd been hearing about his work for years. He's the food researcher who does experiments comparing how much people eat with different serving sizes, different background stimuli, and different kind of feedback telling them how much they've eaten.

According to Wansink, nobody--not even food researchers--are immune to these cues that affect how much we eat, though nearly everyone thinks they are. Reading this has definitely gotten me to pay more attention, trying to put less on my plate and resisting the urge to help myself to seconds.

But I have to say, reading a book about snacking definitely got me thinking quite a bit about...well...snacking.

Trader Joe's Chocolate Sampler

1. I was at Trader Joe a few months ago and I noticed that by the cash registers they were selling stacks of chocolate bars from different parts of the world, as a sampler to taste and compare. They were selling the package for $10-I'd seen similar products for as much as $40. But I try not to buy things on impulse. When I see something I want I usually walk away from it, and if I find myself continuing to think about it, I go back and get it.

I went back for the chocolate bars a few days later but they were gone, and when I asked about them I was told that the distributor was out as well, and they'd be back some time during the coming year. I spotted them again a few weeks ago and this time I'd learned my lesson, so I bought them right away.

So far we've tried the varietals from Equador, Dominican Republic, and Ghana. I think this kind of product is intended for a group of people, say at a dinner party, where you can open all the bars and taste a little of each one after another. We've been opening one every day or two and finishing it so we don't end up with eight open chocolate bars. The ones we've tried have all been lovely--and a little different--but it's too much of a lag for us to really compare.

Still, we've been having a lot of fun with the package, so the next time I shopped at TJ I tried to pick up another one. Sure enough, they were gone. I guess I'll be enjoying this product every few months, when my timing is right.

Queen Anne Market Rebirth

Last weekend at the Ballard Farmers Market I got a note from the management saying that this summer they would not be holding the Queen Anne Farmers' Market, which they've run for the past two summers. The note mentioned difficulties choosing a site, since the schoolyard where the market had been held was not currently available, and it also said that sales at the market had been down considerably this past year.

I've never known a market administration to cancel a market before. They tend to take the wise position that building a clientele takes time and tinkering. I'd also heard through the grapevine that there had been some tension between the market organization and the Queen Anne Neighbors for Responsible Growth, the group that had originally decided to bring a farmers' market to the neighborhood. I had a feeling there was more to the story, and that just because this particular market organization wouldn't be running the event, that didn't mean the market was going to be cancelled.

Sure enough, I got a call during the week from someone at the neighborhood organization, and there probably will be a farmers' market on Queen Anne this summer, though the location was still uncertain at the time I got the call. I'm looking forward to seeing how this unfolds: it seems like a unique opportunity to create an event tailored to the needs of a lovely neighborhood where folks really care about their food.